Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Don't stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don't forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don't really read children's books.

We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.